Hmmm… Can we estimate how many ships and airplanes were lost in the Bermuda Triangle? Have their disappearances resulted from human error or weather phenomena? Let’s try to find out. We have a curious story of the S.S. Cotopaxi. This ship vanished in 1925, traveling from Charleston, South Carolina, to Havana. It never reached its destination. Years later, in the 1980s, a wreck was found 40 mi off St. Augustine, Florida. Since specialists could not precisely determine what and where it came from, they nicknamed it “Bear Wreck”. It took many additional years of work, done mainly by marine biologists, to identify that this ship was indeed the missing S.S. Cotopaxi. This was confirmed in January 2020. How did the ship just reappear? And how did it get there, since this mysterious shipwreck isn’t even in the Bermuda Triangle?

Let’s see who came up with this term, “Bermuda Triangle”. Can you actually pinpoint the triangle on a map? No, it’s not an officially recognized location either. The Bermuda Triangle does not appear on any world map. Nobody has agreed on its exact boundaries. There are only assumptions with approximations of the entire area ranging between 500,000 and 1.5 million square miles. By all approximations, the region has a vaguely triangular shape. In 1964 an American author named Vincent Hayes Gaddis first came up with the idea when writing an article for Argosy magazine. He used the Bermuda Triangle to describe a triangular region “that has destroyed hundreds of ships and planes without a trace.”

It is pretty hard to get the number of lost ships and planes because some ships and aircraft have gone missing without leaving a trace. Their wreckage in the region has not been recovered. But the recorded stories should help us. Legends about the Bermuda Triangle date back to the 15th century. Like that of the Italian explorer Christopher Columbus. When sailing through the Atlantic waters, he passed by this location in the late 1400s. In what we now know as the Bermuda Triangle, he saw a huge flame that seemed to just crash into the ocean. Later, he saw an unusual light flashing in the distance at the exact location. Like many other sailors since then, his compass had severe malfunctions. Flight 19: a navy plane on a routine schedule back in 1945 also started the Bermuda Triangle legend.

It was commanded by Lieutenant Charles Taylor, and it’s recorded that he just got lost in the triangle for no reason. Since pilots had no GPS back then, they had to trust their compasses and keep track of how long they’d been flying in a specific direction and their speed. Shortly after completing the task, both of the compasses onboard stopped working correctly. Records found after the plane’s disappearance also indicate that Taylor didn’t have a watch on that particular day. The initial report stated that pilot error was to blame for this unfortunate event. However, because people weren’t satisfied with this outcome, it was changed to “causes or reasons unknown after several reviews.” One surviving pilot named Bruce Gernon suggested he went through an electronic fog while passing above the triangle, making him travel through time!

In 1970, when this incident happened, he was flying his aircraft when it was surrounded by two huge clouds that formed a whirlpool and spiraled. Like many others before him, he noticed that his navigation devices were malfunctioning. When he eventually made it out of those clouds, he discovered that his flight had only taken 35 minutes. It should have taken 75 in total. Since he had no other reasonable explanation for what he went through, he believed he must have been pushed forward in time. It’s not only strange-looking clouds that have been seen above the Bermuda Triangle. In 2014, a pilot recalled almost colliding with a flying object that he could not identify whatsoever! Some of these strange encounters were even caught on tape. It’s the case of an early 2015 flight whose passengers noticed a curious object just floating over the ocean. The pilots have yet to figure out what they actually saw back there.